Nordic Ideology

by Hanzi Freinacht

  With some racist blind spots here and there typical of the period, Marx and Engels at least strived to include all people in an increasingly rational social ord­er—where irrational tendencies such as “fetish­ism” (wanting money for money’s sake, or stuff for stuff’s sake) and “reification” (think­ing that there was some­thing inherently real in arbi­t­rary human con­structs such as God, money or our current political ideo­logy) would no longer determine our lives and govern our societies.

  Most of all, you could say that Marx in some rudimentary sense was “postmodern” because he wanted to create a society that was not pre -modern, but still built upon something else than capitalism; he sought a system in which everyday life and activities revolve around something other than monetary exchanges and where we are not “steered” by money in our organ­ization of, and participation in, everyday life.

  And since capitalism and modernity are inherently inter­twined, the striving for a post-capitalist society is inherently post­­modern: it is that which, by definition, comes after modernity. [155]

  The “real socialism” that followed during the 20th century was a kind of “state capitalism”, hence never achieving the non-capitalist ideal—in pra­c­tice, everyday life still revolved around money, materialism and consum­ption. But still, Marx’s values rather accurately reflect—or herald—an early form of what I call the Postmodern value meme; this certainly in­clud­es the vis­ion of a society that is free from alienation and excessive ine­quality.

  In Marx’s time, there was really no research on developmental psychol­ogy—and certainly nothing that would resemble a four-dimensional poli­tical developmental psychology with the theory of effe­ctive value memes. Sure, you had some early glimmers of such developmental thinking, all crafted by Romantic thinkers: Rouss­eau’s stage theory of children; Schiller, Herder and others played with adult sta­ges of psycho­logical and develop­ment (recycled later, and more fam­ously, by Kierke­gaard). [156] But none of this amounts to a political-psych­ological research program that can track and describe the overall develop­ment of larger demographics and socie­ties.

  Today the situation is very different; we fin­ally have good and ample research to support the idea of people being at different developmental sta­ges—even if the scientific program is still, to our day, rudimentary. But we have something that Marx did not: a science of developmental psych­ology. This changes everything.

  Let’s bring this puppy home. What am I getting at? Well, look at what Marx wrote about. He wrote about how he thought the economic system develops, and how that in turn affects other parts of society and people’s psyches. [157] Marx wrote about economic theory, about the economic system above all. He believed that he was working for a society that would come after cap­ital­ism, one that would be non-capitalist: what he termed “com­m­un­ist”. Notwithstand­ing the limitations of his analysis of the econo­mic sys­tem (there were some, even if he correctly predicted a number of devel­op­ments), he failed to understand that a post-capitalist society would req­u­ire a corresponding post-capitalist psychological development of the pop­ulation to function, or even to emerge in the first place—as well as a cor­responding behavioral and cult­ural develop­ment.

  Hence, Marx was blind to three out of four fields of devel­opment. And so was the communist movement that followed. They had their eyes gouged out by materialist reductionism.

  That’s the Marxian Blindness. Don’t let it infect you.

  The Psychological Prerequisites of Socialism

  What, then, would a political psych­ology of a genuinely func­tional “soci­alist” popul­ation look like? Here’s a rough estimation; they would need to be:

  extremely egalitarian, unimpressed by wealth and power;

  extremely peaceful, non-violent; prone to resolve issues by dialogue and com­pro­mise;

  extremely tolerant of differences and accepting of weaknesses in others;

  capable of taking in and harboring a multiplicity of perspectives, and viewing the perspectives as enriching to each other, being non-judgmen­tal towards others with differing views;

  capable of autonomous critical thinking that goes beyond following the current norms, being able to recognize and bust autocratic, totalitarian tendencies and see through populist “simple solutions”;

  prepared to change their own opinions if good arguments are presented;

  focused on non-material and secular-spiritual issues in life, rather than mater­ial wealth and comfort, working for other rewards than money;

  prepared to view themselves and their own interests in rela­tion to a larger system, preferably one in which all humans in the world are inclu­ded;

  skilled at being inclusive in dialogues, with a battery of good techniques for democratically dividing speaking time, listening to one another and generally being sensitive interlocutors;

  generally emotionally fulfilled and mature, hence difficult to manipulate, seduce, provoke or bribe, and generally less prone to emotional over­reactions;

  in an emotional position where one is not driven by either economic fears, nor fear of military threats, ideally not even personal/emotional fears;

  capable of understanding, acknowledging and actively counteracting pri­v­­ileges and stigmas of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disabilities, class back­ground and even personality types;

  identifying with other things than nationalities, religions, ethnicities and one’s own status in society;

  emph­asize long-term stability and ecological sustainability of the society they live in.

  So that’s the kind of people who would need to be around for a socialist system to work at all. Lots and lots of them. Depending on other factors, you might need up to half of the adult population to fit this description.

  As much as all this sounds like, I am not describing some “super-per­fect impossible goodie-two-shoes”. These people do exist in reasonable num­bers around the world today. You can check off all of the above boxes for a lot of people, without them being impossibly perfect. They are the highly functional, well-to-do, highly educated “liberals”—at least as these people often turn out after a more self-indulging period in their 20s. In other words: people at the Postmodern value meme.

  In the most adv­anced coun­tries in the world today, like the Nordic ones, you have about a quarter of the adult population at this value meme. In a country like the US, the share is lower, unless you zoom in on New York or Calif­o­rnia.

  Marx himself was at this Postmodern value meme. Not so strange real­ly: He was privileged, self-made, intelligent, sensitive, successful, a lead­er; his wife a noble, his father-in-law a mentor and supporter, his pro­fessor a world-class philosopher (Hegel!), his best friend the son of a factory owner and also at genius level of intellect. Not that Marx lived a very easy life, but his was a privileged life that could spur his personal dev­elop­ment into a higher value meme. He was ahead of his time. How many people at the Postmodern value meme were around in his days? The percentage is almost zero, even in London, at the heart of the modern world.

  If you grow up as Oliver Twist, the Post­modern value meme is just not go­ing to happen. It’s just not. You are going to be angry that they beat you as a kid, concerned with getting food, be easily seduced by promises, care little about foreign cult­ures, have little demo­cratic fiber and skills, be pro­ne to want quick reliefs for your aching body and soul, be very anxious to get much richer by any means possible, not have the opportunity to edu­cate yourself. That’s how I would function under such circumstances, and you probably would too.

  So Marx wanted to create socialism in a place and time where there were, frankly speaking, no “soc­ial­ists”. Heck, most socialists today aren’t even socialists. Think about it; significant demographics at the Post­modern value meme have only showed up in the most privileged and sta­ble coun­tries, and only after a hundred years or more of capitalist indust­rialism and social reforms. By far the
most peo­ple of the 19th and 20th cent­uries were at the Modern or earlier value memes. [158]

  In terms of psychological development, there were almost no true “soci­alists” around. Should it then sur­prise us that all the “real” socialist count­ries—Russia, China, and so on—in which popula­tions were gene­rally well below the Modern value meme, ended up repro­d­ucing crude and autocratic syst­ems?

  And how many people at the Postmodern value meme would it take to run a “socialist” (genuinely postmodern and post-capitalist) society? Even the almost 25% in Sweden is not nearly enough. It’s not just that you need a majority, or at least a strong minority, to get your policies through in a demo­cratic manner (so that you can shape the institutions in a corres­pon­ding way)—you also need an army of highly functional postmoder­nists to man all the key functions in such a society. You need teach­ers, politicians, community organizers, bosses, judges, police officers, ad­min­istrators who all genuinely embody the Postmodern val­ue meme.

  They need to be everywhere: much like people at the Modern value meme are needed to man all the positions in today’s modern societies.

  Too Dumb for Complex Societies?

  To be fully functional at the Postmodern value meme, a significant limitation is that you also need to be a relatively complex think­er—one who uses the postmodern values in an encompassing, nuan­ced, context-sensitive, syst­emic way. The cognitive stage of a person’s thinking may have substantial genetic or here­ditary causes (much like IQ). Only about 20% of a normal adult pop­ulation seems to develop to a stage of suffici­ently complex think­ing, one that truly matches the postmodern ideas (this cognitive stage is called “sta­ge 12 Systematic”, according to the Model of Hierarchical Complexity).

  This means that the Post­modern value meme, once it becomes domi­nant in a society’s culture, is often used in “flattened” and simplified ways that can become oppressive, or at least quite annoying, for most people, rather than genuinely inclusive and dem­ocratic.

  In the Nordic countries today, you have a lot of people using flattened and simplified versions of the Postmodern values, and the result is often suffocating and alienating to many. For instance, you get excessive “poli­tical corr­ectness” and simplified versions of feminism as people apply simple, linear, “flattened” versions of the pur­por­tedly sen­si­tive and inclu­sive norms, or when they apply these “sens­itive norms” as ways of pro­mot­ing their own moral worth at the ex­pense of others. This, quite under­stand­ably, leads to resentful populist counter-reactions.

  Just to underscore this, let’s take a look at how intelligence (here meas­ured rather crudely as IQ) relates to political ideology and value mem­es. I prefer to talk about “cog­nitive stage” instead of IQ, but this is the best we’ve got research-wise. Apparently, childhood IQ scores predict fut­ure voting behaviors. Here are figures from the UK, about 6000 people, in 2001. [159]

  UK Party

  Voter IQ Average

  Comment

  Green

  108.3

  Clearly based on postmodern values and environmentalism.

  Liberal Democrats

  108.2

  The social-liberal party, “third player” in UK’s largely bipartisan system.

  Conservative

  103.7

  The large center-right party, mostly modernist values.

  Labour

  103.0

  The large center-left party, mostly modernist values.

  UK Indep­en­dence (UKIP)

  101.1

  Eurosceptic, right wing populist, modernist/ traditionalist values.

  British National

  98.4

  Nationalist, postfaustian/traditionalist values with some faustian (fascist, etc.) undercurrents.

  If you look at the difference between the leaders of the IQ-league and the ones with lowest IQ, you clearly see the scores map per­fectly onto the value memes. The parties that embody the later, or “higher”, value mem­­es seem to attract the more cognitively endowed parts of the popul­ace and the lowest value memes the less intellectually gifted. The pro­gressive par­ties have an IQ score five points above the mainstream, which in turn ave­rages five points above the regressive parties.

  Where­as there may be many different mechanisms at play in this strati­fication [160] process, we can glean the tendency that higher value mem­es re­qu­ire more cognitively advanced people; except that they do not gather around the attractor point of socialism, but around Green Social Liberal­ism, which has turned out to be the real attractor of late modern society—hence the concen­tration of smarts around the Greens and the social-liberal Liberal Democrats.

  Obviously, IQ does not in itself “cause” political progressiveness (in which case Hong Kong and Japan would be full of green social liberals, these being higher IQ populations) but it does, without doubt, inter­act with it in some way. The point here is simply to show that more prog­ressive views may have higher cognitive prerequ­is­ites and that a lot of peo­ple fall short on this measure.

  In Book One, we saw that over 60% of a normal adult population seems to reach the cognitive stages necessary for successfully under­stand­ing and operating the norms of a “modern” society (formal logic). When it comes to post­mod­ern society, we are down to about 20% (systematic logic). For metamodern society—which is the main attractor ahead, as we shall see—we’re down to a harrowing 2% (meta-systematic logic), at least in purely cognitive terms (how complex your thinking is).

  What we’re looking at is a disparaging challenge to our very biology: We are creating a society which we are biologically unequipped to grasp and thrive in. Up until now, people have been smart enough for society. These days we are, as it were, running out of cognitive fuel. We’re not suffi­ciently cognitively complex to productively relate to the society that we our­selves have created—or rather, the society that has emerged, self-organ­ized, as the complex result of our ongoing inter­actions.

  Luckily, there is a lot that can be done about this matter. One part of it has to do with “transhumanism” (changing humanity via gen­etics and technology) but that topic falls outside the scope of this book and is dis­cussed at length by authors like Oxford philosopher David Pearce. And of course, transhumanist development comes with considerable risks, which should best be discussed else­where.

  Another part, which is more relevant to the metamodern political acti­vist, has to do with creat­ing a society that realistically manages all the diff­erent value memes and people at different levels of complexity and per­sonal develop­ment—as well as working to support the long-term advan­cement into higher value memes.

  As you can see, a “socialist” society is completely implausible to crea­te in any genuine or sustainable manner unless you also have perhaps over 40% of the population cognitively functional at the Postmodern value meme, which may be achievable only if we manage to surmount some developmental lim­it­ations in the population at large.

  Murder She Wrote

  I’d like to present three more reasons for why socialism never worked and no postmodern, or post-capitalistic, society ever materialized.

  Reason One: “Pomos” creep others out. People at the Postmodern value meme are likely to alienate, creep out or otherwise pro­voke people at the earlier val­ue memes. Their world, their society and their morality often seem abst­ract, exagg­erated and suffocating to mod­erns and traditio­nalists; just look at how they shake with rage against “political correct­ness”, “social justice warriors” and identity politics.

  One of the main differences between pomos (postmodernists) and the “memos” (metamod­er­nists) is that the latter include the perspect­ives of the earlier value memes and empathize with them (since the memos have a developmental, hier­arch­ical perspective which the pom­os don’t). The pomos just think there is something wrong with mod­erns and traditiona­lists, and that they need to “open up”, stop being so dogmatic and greedy,
or that the spell of “bourgeois ideology” must be broken and so forth.

  And indeed, this was what Marx and Engels wrote about when they used terms such as “ideology” and “false consciousness”; workers were not socialists because they were, in effect, brainwashed by their oppressors. Similar schemata show up again and again in post­modern thought: there is a structure or ideology that fools peo­ple into being non-socialists, non-vegans (“carnists”), non-environ­men­talists, non-feminists, mindless con­sumers, and so on. With Rouss­eau, the pomos all believe some version of the idea that their own way of thinking is default, logical and bene­volent while other people have been fooled and that something is pre­venting the underlying goodness in them to surface. This idea about de­masking and criticizing ideology is married to an implicit assump­tion of Rousseau’s “noble savage” (that modern hu­mans essentially are corrup­ted by society and deep down actually subscribe to all these nice-guy post­modern valu­es), and it comes in so many forms: critical cultural studies, feminist epist­emology, discourse analysis, narrative analysis, etc.

  There may be considerable explanatory value in many of these research fields, but they tend to entirely miss the point regarding developmental psych­ology. Pomos are unaware of the developmental stages and hence assume all humans are inherently postmodern unless some external force prevents them from being so, and hence they try to shake people and wake them up: “What’s wrong with you!? Why aren’t you acting in your own obvious interest!?” This, of course, only rarely works, and it antagon­izes and pro­vokes folks who are modern and traditionalist. It puts psycho­logical dem­ands upon people that cannot be met by their factually existing minds.

  That’s what metamodernists don’t do. They respect people’s stage of develop­men­t and have solidarity with the natural occurrence of their per­spectives and developmental journeys. This is to become all the more im­portant in the years to come as the pomos are going to make up a growing proportion of the population.